Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by al_borland 9 days ago
As people’s default shifts to consumption, they stop posting content themselves. They also stop living a life worth posting about… especially when they start comparing themselves with “influencers”, who have made a full time job out of pretending to live an interesting life.

The problem with filtering out all the junk as a solution is that it doesn’t fix the actual problem of those sites with perverse incentives having control. It seems like the real goal should be to get people off these platforms. That’s the only way to really stop it.

I wonder how long companies would keep paying for ads when a site is 100% bot traffic? They could keep the ruse up for a while, but likely not forever.

1 comments

The problem with some of (all of?) these is that it's becoming increasingly moot to bother posting. I posted back in the early days of social media to share with my friends. In response, my friends and acquaintances kept me up to date with their lives. Now the apps only bother to show me friend/following posts if they deem it matches my interests.

I understand that this sort of algorithmic feed likely matches the metrics to keep people scrolling. This would also track with every app moving away from "friend" verbiage to something like followers, subscribers, or members. Users are encouraged to post _to_ their audience rather than sharing _with_ their friends.

Yes, I mostly stopped sharing because I don't want it to be used for creepy reasons. When Facebook was just a community of sorts, it was fine to share. People who cared would see it. Facebook wasn't doing too much content mining. But in the current world, people who care often don't see it, and if I told them to go looking there, they'd be bombarded by so much ragebait that I couldn't in good conscience recommend it.